03 August 2007

Nautilus


USS Nautilus 1958

Khalil Ahmed is dead. He was a doctor, and he died in a hospital. He was apparently of the opinion that Kafirs- unbelievers- should die. He was one of two physicians who attempted to use car-bombs to attack party-goers in downtown London. When that operation failed, he raced with a partner to the Glasgow, in Scotland, and rammed his Jeep into the airport terminal. He set himself on fire as last dramatic touch, shouting “God is Great!,” which is true, though she might not be on precisely the same sheet of music.

The doctor's burns were so profound that the other doctors could not save him, and he was never able to explain why he had become convinced that he should kill the people around him. Rest, Doctor, soldier of this great stateless war. I hope the pain was lingering and long. Rest and let us think what your individual act of martyrdom portends for all the rest of us.

I think I understand the Doctor's motivation, at least on some level. But it is difficult to intellectually get my arms around why a well-educated man of the health trade would decide on this course of action. It makes me deploy suspicious of the future, and untrusting that our institutions know how to deal with what is coming.

It was thus a positive tonic to hear the arctic bombast from my old friends the Russians.

I understand the full context of submarines and flags. That was the business of my younger years, and a great adventure it was.

I was always a little sad for the downfall of the doughty Soviets, and the shabby suits of their successors. As fellow travelers in the Cold War, I wanted better for them, and hoped that something like Democracy could warm the harsh Moscow winters, and that life would be more worthwhile.

It is a bit disconcerting how this future is working out. The Arctic ice is melting as the climate changes. I think we agree on the cause, finally, but even if all our frenetic human activity is not the cause, the fact remains that the ice is going away, and frozen things are thawing.

The frozen northern waters, once the playground of the Great Game is now becoming open for transit by surface ship; the Canadians are concerned that a real Northern Passage may open right though the upper reaches of the Great White North, and there is oil and gas under the newly exposed navigable waters.

You can count the interested parties on the fingers of a single hand, and they are all intensely watching the new great race of exploration and exploitation. The old adversaries are glowering once more, the US from Alaska at the resurgence Russians, flush with cash from the booming oil market. The prim Swedes and hardy Norwegians are players, along with the Canadians. It is a brand new ballgame in the upper latitudes, and there has not been this much excitement since the creation of the Distant Early Warning Line in the 1950s, and the contrails in the sky as giant bombers flew routinely to their nuclear mission launch points.

Yesterday the word spread that the Russians had planted a flag on the ocean bottom thousands of feet below the North Pole. It was an act of anachronism, straight from the dusty history books, but transformed by technology.

The Russians are interested in expanding their territorial claims, the better to exploit the energy riches of the last frontier. Their claim is nothing short of breathtaking; they assert a claim that the Lomonosov Ridge, a submarine up-rise, is connected to the Russian mainland. They say this means that half the seabed belongs to Moscow.

It was great theater, and a tremendous PR exercise. Russian media and state-controlled television was there to record the great event, and two members of the State Duma were onboard to reinforce the claim.

Of course, it has no basis in reality, but it does provide the context and framework for the new chapter of the Great Game, this time not part of a drive south to the Indian Ocean via the Khyber Pass. Other dangerous men now patrol those hills. The way south is blocked.

North it is, to what is still frozen at the moment.

I was surprised to hear the venerable BBC describe the media circus as something akin to the Lunar Landing. I would have thought that they knew better than to buy into such nonsense.   I would not for an instant discount the skill and technology the deployed politicians to the ocean floor. In fact, I wish such an operation was much expanded, and made permanent.

But as to markers on the seafloor signifying sovereignty, that is old hat.

Today is the anniversary of the first submarine transit under the North Pole. A half-century ago, USS Nautilus, was under the arctic ice. Under the command of cool Commander W. R. Anderson, the sub traveled north from Pearl Harbor through the Bering Strait to the Arctic Ocean, passing under the Pole on August 3, 1958.

The world's first nuclear-powered submarine did not attempt to punch up through the ice, but continued on to surface in the Greenland Sea after being submerged for nearly a hundred hours and more than 1,800 nautical miles.

I didn't say any of this was easy. Navigation was primitive by today's standards, gyrocompass and dead reckoning being the key tools. There had been two previous attempts by the crew, defeated by ice and equipment failure. The third time turned out to be the charm, and the skipper was greeted as a hero by President Eisenhower and decorated with the Legion of Merit, and the ship got the Presidential Unit Citation, which they say had never been awarded in peacetime.

It wouldn't be the last time, but it was certainly the only award made in public.

The interesting thing about Russia and their flag is that they must be aware that it is bogus. Nautilus might have been powered by a nuclear reactor, but her skin was much more like a WW II diesel boat.

In those days, the trash and garbage generated by the crew was dumped overboard through the pressure hull, either through the heads or torpedo tubes. So for the whole 96 hour transit, the United States of America was marking the seafloor, and ought to have asserted sovereignty accordingly.

If the flag of Russia stands now under the North Pole, it is likely that there is a Coke can underneath it, or perhaps a crushed tube of Bryllcream hair-tonic. The old advertising jingle sums it up pretty nicely, and works for trash just as well as flags: “A little dab will do ya.”

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicocotra.com

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